This blog is about The Big Picture - information and insights about what goes on in the world outside our borders - and what it means for Americans. Unless otherwise specified, all photos from Deena Stryker archive.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

CONSTITUTION, FLAG, PEOPLE

Hendrik Hertzberg devoted his this week’s New Yorker editorial to the Constitution as it pertains to our voting system. I have been having slightly different thoughts about it.

I’m wondering whether it’s a good idea for our elected officers to pledge to defend the Constitution, rather than the American people.

Aside from the fact that I know of no other country that has a pledge of allegiance, it’s noteworthy that the American people are asked to pledge allegiance to the flag, whic, one could say represents the american people.

Yet elected officials do not commit to defending the American people. They commit to the defense of a two hundred year old document, whose drafters could never in a million years have imagined the world Americans now live in, so that changes that make sense are often deemed unworthy of debate because it can be argued that they wouuld be contrary to the constitution.

In the name of defending the Constitution, and as a sequitur to their pledge of allegiance to the flag, the American people have been duped into fighting unjustified wars. Any suggestion that we get rid of the pledge of allegiance brings accusations of disloyalty.

Disloyalty to whom? Not to the American people, but to the icons they are trained to worship.

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Welcome to Otherjones!

The alternative press is replete with despair and ‘hope’, neither of which is helpful. ‘Squawking’ may alleviate some of the pain Americans experience at being identified with a government that brutalizes Others at will, but it doesn’t change the ‘facts on the ground’. As for hope, it is an easy cop-out: in the present state of the world, we can never be certain that tomorrow will come. Whether a barefoot child in Africa or a hedge-fund manager, all of us are the potential victims of hubris.

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If You Had Been Watching....

One of the worst aspects of the US media landscape is its neglect of what goes on in the rest of the world. When I returned from nineteen years of living in France, where I sometimes watched CNN’s excellent coverage of world events, I was surprised that in the US, CNN offered nothing comparable. I called the main editorial office in New York and was told ’Americans aren’t interested in foreign affairs’, revealing one one the reasons why the US government gets away with wreaking havoc around the world: Americans have no information that would prompt them to protest their county’s actions abroad.

The fact is that several countries’ governments — aside from the British — fund international television channels. These include France 24, NHK (Japan) , Al-Jazeera (Qatar) RT (Russia) and Telesur (Latin America). These channels usually broadcast in English, Spanish and Arabic, using native speakers, enabling most people in most parts of the world to hear news that their national outlets do not cover and get a broad window onto the world.

Meanwhile, Americans are told that the channel that is most significant for them, RT, is propaganda!

RT is significant not only because, like the other foreign channels it offers a wide range of programs but because it includes opinions from many well-known Americans who are barred from our own mainstream media.

From time to time I will signal significant news stories covered by these foreign channels that are absent from our own.